The Greatest Works of E. E. Smith. E. E. Smith
back to his controls—none too soon.
For one pirate ship was already beaming him viciously. Only the fact that his defensive armament was upon its automatic trips had saved the stolen battleship from practically instantaneous destruction. And as the surprised Lensman began to check his other instruments another space-ship flashed into being upon his other side and also went to work.
As Kinnison had already remarked more than once, Helmuth was far from being a fool, and that new and amazingly effective blanketing of his every means of communication was a problem whose solution was of paramount importance. Almost every available ship had been for days upon the fringe of that interference; observing and reporting continuously. So rapidly was it moving, however, so peculiar was its apparent shape, and so contradictory were the directional readings obtained, that Helmuth’s computers had been baffled.
Then Kinnison’s Bergenholm failed and his ship went inert. In a space of minutes the location of one center of interference was known. Its coordinates were determined and half a dozen warships were ordered to rush that spot. The raider first to arrive had signalled, visually and audibly; then, obtaining no response, had anchored with a tractor and had loosed his bolts. Nor would the result have been different had everyone aboard, instead of no one, been in the control room at the time of the signalling. Kinnison could have read the messages, but neither he nor anyone else then aboard the erstwhile pirate craft could have answered them in kind.
The two space-ships attacking the turncoat became three, and still the Lensman sat unworried at his board. His meters showed no dangerous overload; his noble craft was taking everything her sister-ships could send.
Then Thorndyke stepped into the room, no longer a natty officer of space. Instead, he was stripped to sweat-soaked undershirt and overalls, he was covered with grease and grime, and what of his thickly smeared face was visible was almost haggard with fatigue. He opened his mouth to say something, then snapped it shut as his eye was caught by a flaring visiplate.
“Holy Klono’s claws!” he exclaimed, “At us already? Why didn’t you yell?”
“How much good would that have done?” Kinnison wanted to know. “Of course, if I had known that you were loafing on the job and could have snapped it up a little, I would have. But there’s no particular hurry about this. It’ll take at least four of them to break us down, and I was hoping you’d have us travelling before they overload us. What was on your mind?”
“I came up here—One, to tell you that we’re ready to blast; Two, to suggest that you hit her easy at first; and Three, to ask if you know where there’s any grease-soap. But you can cancel Two and Three. We don’t want to play around with these boys much longer—they play too rough—and I ain’t going to wash up until I see whether she holds together or not. Blast away—and won’t those guys be surprised!”
“I’ll say so—some of this stuff is NEW!”
The Lensman twirled a couple of knobs, then punched down hard upon three buttons. As he did so the flaring plates became dark; they were again alone in space. To the dumbfounded pirates it was as though their prey had slipped off into the fourth dimension. Their tractors gripped nothing whatever; their ravening beams bored unimpeded through the space occupied an instant before by resisting screens; tracers were useless. They did not know what had happened, or how, and they could neither report to nor be guided by the master mind of Boskone.
For minutes Thorndyke, vanBuskirk, and Kinnison waited tensely for they knew not what to happen; but nothing happened and then the tension gradually relaxed.
“What was the matter with it?” Kinnison asked, finally.
“Overloaded,” was Thorndyke’s terse reply.
“Overloaded—hooey!” snapped the Lensman. “How could they overload a Bergenholm? And, even if they could, why in all the nine hells of Valeria would they want to?”
“They could do it easily enough, in just the way they did do it; by banking accumulators onto it in series-parallel. As to why, I’ll let you do the guessing. With no load on the Bergenholm you’ve got full inertia, with full load you’ve got zero inertia—you can’t go any further. It looks just plain dumb to me. But then, I think all pirates are short a few jets somewhere—if they weren’t they wouldn’t be pirates.”
“I don’t know whether you’re right or not. Hope so, but afraid not. Personally, I don’t believe these folks are pirates at all, in the ordinary sense of the word.”
“Huh? What are they, then?”
“Piracy implies similarity of culture, I would think,” the Lensman said, thoughtfully. “Ordinary pirates are usually renegades, deficient somehow, as you suggested; rebelling against a constituted authority which they themselves have at one time acknowledged and of which they are still afraid. That pattern doesn’t fit into this matrix at all, anywhere.”
“So what? Now I say ‘hooey’ right back at you. Anyway, why worry about it?”
“Not worrying about it exactly, but somebody has got to do something about it, or else .”
“I don’t like to think; it makes my head ache,” interrupted vanBuskirk. “Besides, we’re getting away from the Bergenholm.”
“You’ll get a real headache there,” laughed Kinnison, “because I’ll bet a good Tellurian beefsteak that the pirates were trying to set up a negative inertia when they overloaded the Bergenholm; and thinking about that state of matter is enough to make anybody’s head ache!”
“I knew that some of the dippier Ph.D.’s in higher mechanics have been speculating about it,” Thorndyke offered, “but it can’t be done that way, can it?”
“Nor any other way that anybody has tried yet, and if such a thing is possible the results may prove really startling. But you two had better shove off, you’re dead from the neck up. The Berg’s spinning like a top—as smooth as that much green velvet. You’ll find a can of soap in my locker, I think.”
“Maybe she’ll hold together long enough for us to get some sleep.” The technician eyed a meter dubiously, although its needle was not wavering a hair’s breadth from the green line. “But I’ll tell the cockeyed Universe that we gave her a jury rigging if there ever was one. You can’t depend on it for an hour until after it’s been pulled and gone over; and that, you know as well as I do, takes a real shop, with plenty of equipment: If you take my advice you’ll sit down somewhere while you can and as soon as you can. That Bergenholm is in bad shape, believe me. We can hold her together for a while by main strength and awkwardness, but before very long she’s going out for keeps—and when she does you don’t want to find yourself fifty years from a machine shop instead of fifty minutes.”
“I’ll say not,” the Lensman agreed. “But on the other hand, we don’t want those birds jumping us the minute we land, either. Let’s see, where are we? And where are the bases? Um . . . um . . . Sector bases are white rings, you know, sub-sector bases red stars .” Three heads bent over charts.
“The nearest red-star marker seems to be in System 240-16-37,” Kinnison finally announced. “Don’t know the name of the planet—never been there .”
“Too far,” interrupted Thorndyke. “We’ll never make it—might as well try direct for Prime Base on Tellus. If you can’t find a red closer than that, look for an orange or a yellow.”
“Bases of any kind seem to be scarce around here,” the Lensman commented. “You’d think they’d be thicker. Here’s a violet triangle, but that wouldn’t help us—just an outpost. . How about this blue square? It’s just about on our line to Tellus, and I can’t see anything any better that we can possibly reach.”
“That looks like our best bet,” Thorndyke concurred, after a few minutes of study. “It’s probably several breakdowns away, but maybe we can make it—sometime. Blues are pretty low-grade space-ports, but they’ve got tools, anyway. What’s the name of it, Kim—or is it only a number?”
“It’s